


three black carriages (three white carts)

by sunflowerbright



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Canon!Verse fic, Canonical Character Death, Dying at the Barricades, F/M, Jess our friendship is so painful jesus christ, M/M, Multi, OT3, Other, Prompt!fic from thebravehobbit, some fluff also in a futile attempt to balance all the angst and dying, this was so painful to write i cried for about an hour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-13
Updated: 2013-08-13
Packaged: 2017-12-23 09:00:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/924472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflowerbright/pseuds/sunflowerbright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“I wish she had never met us,” Joly confesses, on the dark, bleak day when they are about to die</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	three black carriages (three white carts)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheBraveHobbit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBraveHobbit/gifts).



> This is written for my lovely tinybat, who started musing about the scene in the book, where the rebels talk about letting people with families slip away from the barricade: at first, no-one wishes to leave the cause behind, but eventually they settle on four with duties elsewhere, to take on the four uniforms they have available, and slip away to safety. The prompt was basically: Joly and Bossuet each thinks the other should go back to Musichetta, so that they will not both leave her behind. I took the initial prompt and kind of ran with it, and this happened.

 

**Three Black Carriages (Three White Carts)**

 

 

 

_”It is a strong position. The barricade is sound. Thirty men can hold it. Why sacrifice forty?”_

_”Because no-one wants to leave.”_

Enjolras and Combeferre come back out with four of the guard’s uniforms, stripped from the dead, stolen from traitors. Bossuet sees them, and for one blinding, frightful moment, thinks _we could both get out alive._

He wishes the thought was to all of them, but there is yet one at this barricade his thoughts linger on more, and he can’t begrudge himself that, not now at the end of the world.

However, it is just Bossuet’s luck that he has befriended the very people who would never so choose to leave this fight behind: the very people who has planned for it and lived for it, breathed for it, if only for a few months - months that seems endless. now A lifetime.

A lifetime of worry in dark eyes, set above a mouth that won’t speak such things, because she knows she cannot stop determined hearts so set on their path.

No, they cannot do this: cannot request this of friends who rely on them, friends who are as brothers. They cannot leave this place peacefully together.

He turns to Joly, but the man speaks before him.

“You should go,” he looks pale, but it might just be the fading moon-light; Joly is often pale, from worry or laughter or illness, imagined and real alike. It makes his cheeks bloom rosier when Bossuet teases him to the point of embarrassment. “You should go back to her.”

_You should not leave her alone._

“Me?” Bossuet laughs, quickly and not without mirth, though he has to drag it from the very bottom of his usually vast sea of humour. “Pull on a uniform of the guard? They would see my bald head reflected upon the moon and immediately recognise me, and it would all be wont for nothing. Or worse, I should stumble into a pit in the dark and quite die by injuries cause of foolishness.”

(a voice inside his head that sounds suspiciously like Grantaire tells him he is already going to die from foolishness. that they all are)

“It is you who should go,” Bossuet says, and tries not to let hope colour his voice. He wants this: wants this almost more than his own life. Wants Joly to be safe, and Musichetta not to be alone.

Combeferre is speaking of families in the distance, of duties laid elsewhere, and there is anger, rising in Bossuet suddenly.

“You should _go_ ,” his voice is harsh, and it is never harsh, but nerves have been frayed by the last few hours, and the moonlight shines pale on Joly’s wide eyes. He doesn’t move a muscle, and it is Bossuet who has to take a step forward, voice lowered in search of private conversation, even here, surrounded by the living and the dying.

“You would see her abandoned? You would see her alone?”

It is not, Bossuet thinks, Joly he is angry with. It is as much himself. It is as much their circumstances, the narrow steps that have lain before them on this path. He is a clumsy soul; he has fallen many times on the slopes and the hills of it, and he falls yet, and will fall again.

He has always done his best to make sure that neither of the other two would have to.

But now his own falling has affected one of them he holds most dear, and Joly’s paleness can no longer only be attributed to the moon and its harsh glare.

“There are others in greater need,” Joly tells him, and true, five men are being called out, five for only four uniforms, five men with families.

An uneven number, and even more sorrow to be had. The anger leaves Bossuet as suddenly as it had befallen him, and he turns to Joly to ask forgiveness, to apologise for words spoken in desperation and fear, but the other man has turned and walked away already, head bowed.

 

 

 

 

 

“You are yet awake?”

Musichetta turns quickly from the window, as if caught in an unpermitted act by an upholder of the law: her hair has gotten very long, and it falls over her shoulder to land heavily on her back as she moves.

“I did not mean to startle you,” Bossuet says, voice lowered in regret, lips raised in a smile. Musichetta sees it and narrows her eyes, hardly keeping her own smile away.

“Truly?”

“Well…”

“I am rather impressed you managed to sneak up on me without knocking something over, or otherwise alerting me, and the rest of Paris, to your presence.”

Bossuet’s smile is beaming now. “I am too!”

This earns him a quick laugh from her. “So you did mean to startle me! As a celebration of your new-found skill!”

“And yet, the attempt would most likely not have been as successful had your own thoughts not been far away in the moment,” Joly’s voice comes from the open doorway, the man himself leaning against the wall with an air of faked nonchalance. Musichetta looks to him, and her features convey happiness and worry, and a sense of wariness all at once. He wishes to reassure her, let her be at ease around them as she usually always is, but this is not the time.

“So you mean to ambush me together?” her tone is teasing, yet sharp, catching on as quickly as they expected her to. She laughs, however, at the pure distress on Joly’s face at her use of the word _ambush_. It makes Bossuet smile as well, even as he sits down on the chair by the table, the weight of standing suddenly as heavy as his heart.

He is not used to having a heavy heart: far from it. The only thing he can think to do is reach out and take hold of Musichetta’s hand, standing as she still is: she lets him, and pressing back with the surprise amount of strength she has possessed for as long as he has known her. He almost trembles with something not quite fear, when she holds out her free hand for Joly to take.

And Joly does, walking forward with quick steps, standing as close to Musichetta as he can without crowding her, without smothering what is already an uncomfortable situation: his eyes remain on Bossuet, as if still afraid Musichetta will accuse him again, that her eyes will glare the way that always makes him squirm and feel guilt beyond measure.

“We did not mean to ambush,” Bossuet declares, when Joly still does not speak, clearly too afraid of tongue slipping unwanted words free. “Merely to push sad thoughts aside.”

“And you to develop the very skills of a spy in order to do so,” Musichetta says, still smiling, though the shadows in her eyes multiply still. “I yet stand impressed.”

“But no less worried,” Joly says, face blank in such a way as it never is: there is always a smile or a frown to be found, never just a mask. Bossuet dislikes masks: they reflect nothing and are nothing, yet appear as if they see all still.

“I love you,” Musichetta says. “And I will worry for you for as long as I will love you. And,” she adds, voice growing softer yet. “I will always love you.”

 

 

 

 

 

Bossuet finds Joly near an overturned cart, Gavroche and Bahorel close by, yet no other save the look-outs to pay heed to the two of them.

“I am sorry,” he says. “I spoke harshly and unfairly, and I have no excuse.”

“You were frightened, as was I,” Joly says in a placating tone, and Bossuet knows he has already been forgiven. “You were…”

“Not right.”

“You merely worried.”

He sits down beside him, and feels his heart lift, if only a little, as Joly places his head on his shoulder, moving closer.

“As we all do,” he does his best to focus, if only in this moment, on the soft body pressed against his side, arms snaking around wiry shoulders: there is a smell of fear and blood, gunfire and spirits hanging in the air, accompanied by the heavy dew of night, but this close there is the pure scent of Joly to cancel out the others: Bossuet, as always, finds comfort in it.

“I wish things were different,” Joly confesses, morose at the end of their lives like he never was before: perhaps he had merely saved it all up for this moment only, to enjoy life to its fullest, with a smile upon his lip. Grief is for the dying and the remaining. But Bossuet is doing his best not to think of the remaining as of this moment.

Thoughts of that have plagued him for far too long, and will do so in his last moments, he is sure. If only for a single second, he will allow himself this instead.

“I wish,” Joly continues. “That one of us had left, but for the life of us all, it could not have been me, and I know it could not have been you, and I am left with no option. I would not leave you, and I know you would not leave me, and it is a cruel fate that we both leave her, then.”

Bossuet tightens his hold, and blinks to keep unwanted tears at bay. “I too wish things were different,” he says, though the thought is obvious: he says it aloud anywhere. For solidarity, and the slight thread of hope he dares to hold unto.

“I wish she had never met us,” Joly confesses then, and it is a silly thought, a foolish one, bordering on blasphemous, born not of regret for the action, but regret for how the whole affair will end, and end soon -  and Bossuet knows Joly expects him to agree with him now, but all he can do is let out a laugh, too loud for such sombre times and such a dark and desolate place as this.

Joly shushes him and stares, though a smile unwillingly curves the edges of his lips: he cannot quite help it. It has always been so when Bossuet laughs.

“I do not,” he says, as way of explanation in the face of Joly’s confusion. “I do not wish she had been absent our lives. For her sake, maybe. But I am selfish enough to admit that it was the luckiest day and happiest moment of my life, the day I first met the two of you. It was within the same day, if you might recall.”

Joly stares at him for a long, unclear moment, and his eyes grow lighter in those seconds, as if but an edge of the shadow in his heart has fallen away now.

“It was not, technically,” Joly says then, light teasing in his tone. “It was past midnight when you drunkenly stumbled upon me inside that tavern, yelling about a woman with the eyes of the goddess Diana herself.”

Bossuet’s smile turns even wider. “I do not quite recall that.”

“Well, _I_ do,” Joly frets. “You were bleeding from the temple after a blow, but you were relentless in finding this woman.”

“As you may recall, she owed me money,” he exclaims, laughter colouring his words. “It is not often I win a game of dice, and to win over someone of such cunning was a noble thing indeed! I could not let such an opportunity slip past me.”

“Yes, I suppose you would rather celebrate. Fortune such as that does not happen to you often.”

Bossuet’s eyes turn soft. “It has happened to me every day since that night,” he says, pressing a kiss to Joly’s temple as the words fade into a new-blowing wind, rousing the others to wake as daylight approaches.

“Except for today,” Joly tells him. Bossuet does not comment.

 

 

 

 

 

He is awakened by a tickling sensation across his face, and he only just manages to smile before a violent sneeze jerks him completely from the embraces of slumber, and in his flailing he knocks against the tickling offender, who shrieks and bumps into another, accompanied by more shrieking.

“Musichetta, what on earth!” Joly’s voice, the source of the second shrieking fills the air, and Bossuet opens his eyes to see limbs entangled in sheets and even more limbs: he laughs as Musichetta huffs and frees herself from the tangle, swatting Joly lightly on the nose as she finds herself freed again.

“You were in my way,” she tells him sternly. “And Bossuet, the lazy wretch, was still asleep upon late morning!”

“We have nothing of worth to do today,” Bossuet complains, though he stretches his arms above his head instead of letting them fall back to the rest from earlier. “You could have let me sleep a while longer.”

Joly widens his eyes comically at Musichetta, who stares as shocked back at him.

“Nothing of worth,” Joly says, horror in his voice.

“Nothing of worth,” Musichetta repeats, turning to stare at Bossuet as if he had declared his love for the both of them fallen to pieces. _“Nothing of worth!”_

“But it is such a beautiful day!” Joly crows.

“The sun is shining outside!”

“The flowers are blooming!”

“Everyone is smiling!”

“The rain has finally stopped!”

“Although,” Musichetta stops them here, as Bossuet pulls the sheet over his head to muffle his own laughter. “If we do venture outside with this one, it might start again.”

“I heard that!”

“You were quite meant to!”

He pulls the sheet away again, perhaps to glare at his lovers, although the effect is possibly ruined by his own laughter, and the half-affronted, half-teasing faces his two opponents still bear.

“It is a beautiful day,” he agrees as they continue to stare at him. “I do however fail to see why we cannot enjoy it inside.”

He reaches for them, and they come to him both, laughing and smiling.

 

 

 

 

 

It is just Bossuet’s luck that what he sees upon falling is Joly’s face, already drawn of life.

Warmth spreads from the wound in his stomach, as quickly as the blood now staining his clothes: he does not even feel it when he hits the ground. All he sees is the face of one he loves.

Joly’s eyes reflect nothing in death, and they see nothing either. It is the last clear thought in Bossuet’s head, before the same haven turns to greet him in darkness.

 

**Author's Note:**

> \- The first two sentences are from the Penguin Classics translation of the Brick, by Norman Denny
> 
> \- We also got talking about which of them died first, Bossuet or Joly (since Hugo does not make it clear), and I decided to be cruel and add that to the fic as well, because I have no soul
> 
> \- The title is from the lyrics to the song 'Gone' by Ionna Gika. You can listen to it [here](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhyC0k6j3Rg)


End file.
